Jews: The Canaries In the Mine of History

…The Jews have been called “the canaries in the mine” of history, and there is profound truth in this. I am struck by this “blurb” from a tract by David Solway, the remarkable Canadian poet (Hear, O Israel! — just published by Mantua Books):

“Hatred of the Jew is the perpetual vestige of Western resentment and vexation against its own civilizing imperative. This too was Winston Churchill’s understanding of Jew-hatred, which he described as Western civilization’s revolt against its own central values as manifested in art, science, and political and religious organizations …

“The spectacle we are observing today — the reluctance to deal adequately with terrorism, the political contriving against our own best interests, the serpentine efforts to exculpate the enemy, the relativizing of moral principle, the Left’s betrayal of its own liberal culture, the renewed ‘treason of the intellectuals’, and especially the mounting acerbity towards Jews in the court of public opinion, and the isolation of Israel as a pariah state — is merely the modern instantiation of this long offensive against our very survival.”

As a (Catholic) writer who has been called a “Jew-lover” by quite a few phone callers and e-mailers over the years since 9/11, I should like to admit the charge, and stand by the position. The synagogues of Europe have been painted with swastikas again, this time mostly by Islamists; the president of Iran has openly prophesied the “final end” of Israeli Jewry in “fire and the sword” — and the Chamberlain president of the United States seeks negotiations with him.

As World War II stirred from the ashes of World War I, so World War III seems to stir from the ashes of World War II. On this day of remembrance, we must think of the future…